Mark’s Best Of Gaming – Dokapon Kingdom (2008)

Mark’s Best Of Gaming is a series of articles detailing the absolute best games of all time, but not necessarily in any particular order or with any intention other than letting you know, if you haven’t played these, what even is your life. What even is. With that blurb out of the way, today, we’re talking about;

Dokapon Kingdom

I should pre-face this article by mentioning the tagline for this game. “The Friendship-Destroying Game!”

Dokapon Kingdom’s marketing team gets a 10/10

With that being said, this game is possibly the best designed 4- player mutiplayer experience that you could ever hope to partake in. Developed by Sting and Published by Atlus in North America, it’s a unique RPG/Board Game hybrid, meaning turn-based battles, and dice rolling movement around a game-board. If you’ve ever played Mario Party you’ll know that board game style multiplayer games are surprisingly a good time, but after playing this, I don’t think I can ever go back to settling for just Mario Party.

Woah. Hold on. “Settle”? “Just”? Those are some pretty bold claims good sir. Please relax your shoulders, fasten yourself into your seat comfortably, and make sure you’ve had plenty of fluids, because your entire world is about to shatter. Everything you’ve ever experienced up until now has been a farce. This game will become your entire life and you will enjoy every minute of it.

Lots of variety in playstyles as a result of many different playable classes

Let me paint you a picture. You sit down with three of your buddies, all you need is this game and one controller (although you can use 4 if you have them). You each create a character, name them, pick a class and gender, as well as a colour. You then race around the world, trying to amass more money than your opponents. You do this by basically beating the living snot out of each other, capturing towns and investing in them. After your so-called friends steal your bustling towns away from you, you can get back at them by hiring theives and assasins to murder and deface them until they throw the controller at you and leave. The game gives you all sorts of tools to mock each other with, including the ability to re-name a character, take their stuff, and all around humiliate them.

GET REKT!

Playing with my friends I’ve seen all sorts of re-naming shenanigans as there’s no filter for “bad” words, common in today’s modern games. Yes, you can name your friend “Poop” if you beat them in a fight, and the game will then refer to them that way in every possible way, from the status screen, to how NPC’s greet them. Don’t fret though, if you’re consistently in last place, the game has a way to even the playing field and get revenge for all the injustices done to you.

Those who are in last place, get visited from basically the devil, who offers you an item that allows you to transform into a really overpowered demon with practically maxed out stats called a Darkling.

There are plenty of classes in the game, but you can start with Warrior, Thief, or Magician. You pick one of these three, and can switch between them, unlocking more classes as you master those ones.

As I alluded to earlier, this game blows other board-based party games out of the water, at least in my opinion. This game gives you a lot more reason to be fully engaged, because you have to build your character’s stats just like you would in an RPG. It’s also got a plethora of surprising events that will occur pretty much at random as you move about and land on different spaces. I have no idea what the developers were thinking when they decided that players should come across these events, but they deserve all of my money for it. You may be randomly abducted by aliens, challenged to rock-paper-scissors, or asked to donate some money to a random homeless man who either turns into a goddess, or leaves and just takes your money, among other random events, instead of entering a space that you thought would trigger a fight with a monster.

The maps all have unique landscapes and environments, keeping things interesting as you progress around the world.

There’s a LOT of content too. My friends and I managed to play a single game on story mode for at least 40 hours. Not consecutively, mind you, we did it over the course of several months. The game doesn’t make you play that long however, you can set limits such as number of turns when you set up the game, to ensure you’ll finish before you murder each other.

By the end of it for us, bonds had been formed, stronger than the grudges we held during the game, and I’d play this game again and again if I could.

The game is unfortunately very difficult to find nowadays. It’s playable on the Wii, Wii U, and PS2. I suppose you can order it still from Amazon though~! After all’s said and done, Dokapon Kingdom was WELL worth the blood sweat and tears we put into playing it, and you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this, gather 3 friends, and have the time of your life.